Steven Epp returns to New Haven in another comedy

Joe Meyers

Published 3:04 pm, Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Actor Steven Epp (above) has teamed up with director Christopher Bayes for their third comedy at Yale Rep, Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist," running through Dec. 21. Their production of "A Doctor In Spite of Himself" was a hit in 2011.
Photo: Contributed Photo

Actor Steven Epp (above) has teamed up with director Christopher...

Steven Epp is starring in the production of Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" at Yale Rep in New Haven through Dec. 21.
Photo: Contributed Photo

After scoring huge hits in previous Yale Rep productions of "A Doctor in Spite of Himself" and "The Servant of Two Masters," Steven Epp has returned to New Haven to star in a third classic comedy, Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist."

Reteaming with director Christopher Bayes, the Minneapolis actor is happy to be mining stage laughs once again, but is somewhat daunted by the challenge of making a 1970 Italian political farce seem freshly minted for Connecticut theatergoers.

The production is running through Saturday, Dec. 21.

"It's got to stay alive. Comedy has to be played with incredible precision and timing and yet at the same time it has to look like we just made it up," Epp said in a recent pre-rehearsal interview.

"We are doing a very delicate balancing act, but we've been having a great time in rehearsal. It's a great playground for us," he added of getting the show ready for its first public performances.

Yale Rep press spokesman Steven Padla noted that the earlier Bayes/Epp production of "The Servant of Two Masters" became "its own not-for-profit cottage industry -- following the original Yale run, the production has been presented at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC (for which Steve won the Helen Hayes Best Actor Award), the Guthrie, ArtsEmerson in Boston, and most recently Seattle Rep."

Bayes and Epp work in the Italian commedia tradition in which a traveling comic show is tweaked each night to keep it fresh for each new audience. "We build a culture around the show for us and we don't really know what we have until we get it in front of an audience. ... It's great being at Yale, where we have been able to invite students in for some of the rehearsals," Epp said.

"We keep learning all the time. ... With `Servant' it felt like we barely knew what we were doing" (at Yale Rep), he added of the hit production that wound up traveling the country.

Fo's play takes place in the aftermath of the death of a suspected anarchist, who is found below a fourth-floor police station window.

Did he fall, or was he pushed?

Originally set in the volatile political atmosphere of Italy 43 years ago, the play has been successfully translated to many different cultures around the world. The universality of Fo's comic world view was recognized with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997.

"We reach a certain point in rehearsal where we need more information -- the nightly information from the audience," Epp said of the way that any commedia production changes and evolves over time.

"The joy and magic of it is part of the exhilaration of live theater."

Epp said some of the electricity in each performance is due to a sense of "danger" felt by both the audience and the actors on stage.

"The audience knows this whole thing could fall apart ... and they're not sure what we are going to be doing next," he said.

Although Epp has excelled in drama and comedy, he said the latter is much more daunting, if only due to the fact that you get a moment-by-moment sense of whether or not the show is working.

Absolute silence is expected during a tragedy, but if there are few laughs in the first few scenes of a comedy, the actors are in big trouble.

"It is the worst thing," Epp said of being in a farce that is not scoring laughs. "The whole concept of flop sweat derives from that idea."

The flip side, of course, is that nothing can beat being in a theater where an audience is laughing helplessly at a great comedy.

"That is a really special thing and it's incredibly cathartic -- for us and the audience -- there is nothing else quite like it," Epp said.